When No One's Watching

Corporations are only after one thing. George Patrick tells all.

Imagine a beautiful, blue ocean. Hundreds of men, women, and kids bobbing in the water. And circling around, a host of gigantic sharks. Every now and then, a bobbing head screams and disappears in a little swirl of blood.

The sharks are not evil – they are simply perfectly evolved swimming, eating organisms. Morality doesn’t come into it.

In our world, the giant sharks feeding upon us are the corporations. Like sharks, corporations are highly evolved mechanisms – except that they are designed to make as much money as possible for their shareholders. Sharks must keep swimming or die; corporations must keep making money or perish. The corporate mantra is profit, profit, profit. Morality has nothing to do with it.

Everyone knows this already. It’s basic economics: Gordon Gekko meets Adam Smith.

Every week, it seems some corporation or other is shown to be felonious like Airbus, deceptive like Toyota, reckless like BP. Hardly surprising. It’s the nature of the corporate beast.

When corporate misbehaviour gets bad enough – as with the recent Wall Street shenanigans and BP’s Gulf of Mexico disaster – politicians (who are financially beholden to these same corporations) start making loud harrumphing noises and simulating righteous indignation; Corporate CEOs then eat thin slices of humble pie for the cameras; and the US president waxes eloquent about “good corporate citizens.” In short, it’s the usual phonies’ convention – a world class baloneyfest.

We’d like the promises of corporate redemption to be true. In a society where many people choose to believe the palpably untrue because they want it to be true, it’s very tempting to believe that the corporations that penetrate almost every nook and cranny of our lives are decent moral entities. But they’re not. Sure, they’ll be “good corporate citizens,” but only if there’s more profit in it. All the rest is window dressing – very expensive window dressing.

Corporations spend lots of money to convince us what wonderful folks they are. You want green? Hey, we’re greener than Kermit the Frog. You want warm and sincere? We can do sincere like you wouldn’t believe. You want ethics? You oughta read our corporate mission statement. Trust us. We’re leading you to the warm, sunlit uplands. We’re your friends.

Hey, we’ll sponsor pink ribbon runs. We’ll help sick kids in hospital (pardon me while I wipe the tears from my cheek). We’ll give you jazz festivals, or golf tournaments, or Shakespeare in the park. We’ll wrap ourselves in the flag and take coffee to our heroes in Afghanistan. Just tell us what you want and we’ll give it to you because we are incredibly warm and sincere – not to mention ethical – folks you can really, really trust.

Nice fantasy.

I repeat. Corporations are machines designed to make maximum profits for their shareholders. Period. Modern advanced states like Canada – states with some sort of stable democracy, an honest judiciary, investigative journalism, many educated and savvy citizens, pressure groups, critical academics and intellectuals – can exercise some control and supervision over corporate behaviour. Even so, that didn’t stop  Karlheinz Schreiber from bribing our politicians with a $20 million slush fund from the Airbus corporation, or slipping cash under the table to ex-Prime Minister Mulroney (sleazy meets cheesy).

The true measure of any person – or corporation – is what they do when they think no one is watching. And it’s in the less fortunate societies tucked away in the dark corners of our media world that we see the true primeval nature of corporations. There, far from the eyes of the world, they cozy up to the most appalling regimes, foment civil war, engineer coups, turn a blind eye to massacre, torture and slavery, and lay waste to the environment. No messy moral quandaries. No warm, fuzzy moments here. It’s all strictly business. Here in North America, for example, we’ve been fixated on BP’s oil disaster in the Gulf. Meanwhile (the Guardian newspaper reports), the oil leaked into the Niger Delta in Nigeria by Shell and Exxon is many times greater – the equal of the Gulf spill every year, year after year. There, they can get away with it.

Corporations produce lots of valuable things for humanity. We are increasingly dependent on them. But let’s have no illusions. Corporations are after only one thing – and it’s not love.